Night Train (film)

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Night Train
Directed by	Jerzy Kawalerowicz
Written by	Jerzy Kawalerowicz Jerzy Lutowski
Starring	Lucyna Winnicka Leon Niemczyk
Music by	Andrzej Trzaskowski
Cinematography	Jan Laskowski
Editing by	Wieslawa Otocka
Distributed by	Telepix
Release date(s)	September 6, 1959
Running time	93 min.
Country	Poland
Language	Polish
IMDb profile

Night Train (aka Baltic Express) is the English title for Pociąg, a film released in 1959 and directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz.

Two strangers, Jerzy (Leon Niemczyk) and Marta (Lucyna Winnicka), accidentally end up holding tickets for the same sleeping chamber on an overnight train to the Baltic Sea coast. While handsome, well dressed and rather laconic, Jerzy seems ill at ease, while Marta is not talkative and would prefer to be alone. Staszek (Zbigniew Cybulski) is a student and Marta's spurned lover, and won't leave her be. When the police enter the train in search of a murderer on the lam, rumors fly and everything seems to point toward one of the main characters as the culprit. The killer is located down the corridor however, yet Kawalerowicz keeps the tension strung taut to the end in one of his finest works.

This is a more amorphous and ambiguous tale than the other masterpieces of the Polish School, and Night Train seems to lack the direct references to recent history and the contemporary political situation of the Poland of the 1950s that are a hallmark of the style. However, the Hitchcockian atmosphere, the unimaginably tight shots and the overall sense of clausterphobia and dred evoke the sense of disappointment following in the wake of 1956 and the end of the "Polish Spring." All of Kawalerowicz’s films deal with individual fate in a society being crushed by overwhelming external forces, whether war or politics, in an attempt to examine moral choice under pressure. Night Train is no exception, only here he has created an allegory of misfits among a society of passengers, a society that is predicable, suspicious of individuality and eager to punish. All of Poland escaping though the night to the end of the line. Ironically, the film may represent in its way the end of the Polish School as well.